Will
by mercurybard
Summary: Sequel to Mothers Before Us. Years later, Gail returns, and what she's come for will effect Caleb more drastically than Chase ever did.


Disclaimer: I don't own _The Covenant_.

Notes: Part of the "Mothers Before Us"-verse. Set seventeen to eighteen years after the movie.

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It took a moment and a brief flare of lightning before Caleb realized what had dragged him up from the depths of sleep. She was in the room with him, standing beside his bed, dripping with rain water and watching him with grim eyes. It had been over seventeen years since he last saw her, standing beneath the trees near the smoking remains of the Putnam barn.

"Gail," he said, or at least tried to say. His mouth barely had the chance to shape the word before she raised a finger to her lips to silence him. A brief flicker of fire across her corneas and her eyes went as dark as the spaces between the stars. On the bedside table near his head, his cell phone lit up as a call was received, shunted to voice mail, and marked as heard. He raised an eyebrow questioningly.

Gail gave the slightest of nods to the woman sleeping beside him in the bed and then headed for the door, moving silently across the thick carpet. His alibi established, Caleb rolled out of bed, shivering slightly as the nighttime chill hit his bare chest, but he didn't bother fumbling around for a shirt. Gail's presence in his house after so many years could only mean something was wrong—very wrong—and it involved Chase.

He closed the bedroom door quietly behind him, and his eyes stole automatically down the hall to where his children slept peacefully in their own rooms. A glance at the grandfather clock across the hall told him it was twelve minutes after two o'clock. In less than half an hour, Garret and Evyn would turn thirteen. She would officially become a teenager, and he'd be imbued with his first taste of Power. Caleb couldn't remember being this scared before, except maybe the night he had faced Chase out at the old Putnam barn.

Gail was waiting for him at the top of the stairs, a hand on the railing. The bolts of lightning flashed closer together, keeping an almost steady light on her through the windows at the front of the house. She was neater than he remembered, more a pulled together and tired woman and less like some horrible fey spirit. Her shirt sleeves still reached all the way to her wrists, but her jeans were close-fitting. Her hair—liberally streaked with silver—was drawn back into a tight bun at the base of her skull.

"It's Chase, isn't it?" He folded his arms over his chest and tried not to let his worry show.

She nodded wearily. Time and Power had not been kind to her. He might have looked a decade or so older than his true age, but she appeared to be in at least her late sixties. "He's dead." She ran her tongue over her lower lip, eyes wandering to the windows and the storm raging outside. "Finally."

Relief crashed into him like a wave, and he almost sagged in relief. "Thank you. You didn't have to come all this way…"

She leaned back against the rail, resting both elbows on it as she focused her eyes on something just over his shoulder. "I'm tired, Caleb. Living like this, with the Power just pushing against the inside of you…" Looking down, she stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jeans. "I don't know how our mothers and fathers lived like this."

"They didn't, at least not for very long." Just an extra decade and he blamed that on Chase and their battle all those years ago. He was doing so well at controlling himself and not using. So damn well. He didn't want his children to grow up fatherless or worse, like he had, with a crippled monster hidden away in the old colony house to serve as a living example of how not to abuse the Power. There was a reason he wouldn't let Kira name any of their sons after his father.

Gail took a deep breath and scuffed the toe of her shoe against the rug. "I'm the last of my line, warlock, and there's no way we can be sure Chase was really the last of his. We thought the Putnam bloodline had ended with his father, but then he turned up. There were times when he got away from me, or before…" She trailed off, dragging the heel of her shoe over the carpet, leaving a line of fibers bending the opposite way of their fellows. It felt awkward standing here, in his pajama pants, watching her struggle to get out whatever it was she had to say. This was worse, Caleb decided, than the night when he and Garret had had The Talk. "The first child is always a son."

She picked at a loose thread on her cuff.

"What do you want Gail?" he asked finally.

Raising her head, she met his gaze. What color were her eyes? Green? Brown? He couldn't remember, and it was too dim on the landing to tell. But they had changed since their first meeting—then, she'd been all defiance and fire. Now, there was just a bone-aching weariness. It showed on her face and in the subtle slump of her shoulders. She ran her tongue over her lip again before answering. "I want to die."

Caleb sank back the opposite rail. He'd known, somewhere inside, that she would say that. While he attended Harvard, got married (maybe not to the woman of his dreams but married nonetheless), and started a family, she'd spent the past few decades fulfilling an ancient charge placed on her by an ancestor by keeping the rest of the world safe from Chase Collins, warlock. Now, Chase was gone, and what else did she have?

Wearily, he rubbed his hands over his face. "You can stay here, if you want. It'll give you some place to start your life over."

Gail snorted. "And what will your wife think of that: a strange woman simply turning up on her doorstep in the middle of the night and then staying?" She laughed. It wasn't a pretty sound. "But, wait, I forgot—I look old enough to be your mother. No threat to your marriage there. Just one more thing my cousin took from me, along with the rest of my fucking life. No, Danvers, I'm ready to die."

He swallowed, feeling a lump in his throat and not being quite sure why it had formed. "What do you need from me?"

"Nothing from you, warlock, but I need to will my powers to someone else, just in case. Someone who will understand the burden I'm placing on her; someone who will have the support of your covenant to help her cope." Flame flickered over Gail's eyes, and suddenly they were nothing but dark holes in her worn face. Her gnarled hands gripped the banister behind her tight enough to make the wood creak. The Power stirred, like a serpent uncoiling behind Caleb's sternum as dread flooded through him. "Evyn Danvers," Gail spoke the name of his daughter in a voice as deep as a grave, "I will you my power!"

Lightning turned the world white as they both screamed.


End file.
